One year after the end of the Civil War congress passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 to invalidate a set of laws restricting the social, political and economic rights of black people known as the black codes. A year later the Reconstruction Acts were passed giving Black men the right to vote and hold elected office. Then, in 1868, the fourteenth amendment of the constitution was ratified granting citizenship and equal protection under the law for all four million recently freed Black men and women. This was a time of rapid, unparalleled progress for Black people in America. During the first election wherein Blacks could participate they cast more ballots than whites and by the end of the Reconstruction era there had been about 2,000 Black men elected to office.

White resistance to these changes was swift and severe. The Ku Klux Klan formed in 1866 with the sole purpose of obstructing Black progress through intimidation and terrorism. They killed Black legislators and targeted schools and churches that, to the Klan, were symbols of Black autonomy.

“Though Democratic leaders would later attribute Ku Klux Klan violence to poorer southern whites, the organization’s membership crossed class lines, from small farmers and laborers to planters, lawyers, merchants, physicians and ministers.”

The Great Betrayal, better known as the Compromise of 1877, marked the beginning of the end of Reconstruction and the first era of Black progress. The Republicans and Democrats struck a backroom deal placing Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House on the condition that remaining federal troops — the only thing propping up Republican state governments and ensuring Black rights were maintained — be removed. This paved the way for a reassertion of white dominance through the gradual enactment of Jim Crow laws that remained in effect for nearly a century.

Fast forward to the Sixties, the period in which Dr. King discussed white backlash in his speech titled, The Three Evils of Society, at the National Conference on New Politics. This was just a few years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and one year before the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (passed four days after Dr. King’s assassination). This spate of social and political gains had an immediate impact — largely due to the efforts of the grassroots. By the time of the 1964 presidential election, the NAACP had registered 5.5 million Black voters in thirty four states and the Black electorate was estimated to be roughly 12 million. The 58.5 per cent Black voter turnout was the highest in history until the election of Obama in 2008.

The immediate backlash to these advances is common knowledge — images and video footage of church bombings, Black teenagers water hosed and mauled by police dogs are indelibly etched in the collective psyche of America. However, what’s not as commonly known or taught in school, is that white resentment didn’t end there. It took on a “kinder, gentler face” in the decades to follow. This was the beginning of the era of dog whistle politics — racially coded language artfully employed to tap into white anxiety by its architects, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. This paved the way for a systematic attempt to rollback civil rights advances now known as the “Southern Strategy”.

White students began to file lawsuits against universities to overturn affirmative action policies while conservative presidents and legislators talked about the need for “law and order”, and restoring the supremacy of “state’s rights” — an eery echo of the 19th century rhetoric used by the confederacy in defense of slavery. White dominance was being reasserted yet again, this time in less overtly violent ways.

In 2008, the election of President Obama gave many Black folks the hope for a new era of Black progress. Some argue that Black folks have achieved significant advances since then while others question just how much he’s done. While the extent to which Black America has benefitted from his election is debatable the subsequent racial polarization of America isn’t. In fact, it can be argued that the election of Obama was just as polarizing a force as the Reconstruction Acts or the public accommodations bill. Not long after the 2008 election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported 200 hate-related incidents. During the first four years of Obama’s tenure both implicit and explicit anti-Black among attitudes among Americans increased. In the lead up to the 2012 presidential election efforts were made in many southern states to disenfranchise Black voters through voter ID laws. White America was in revolt.

Just in case you haven’t picked up on the pattern, let me note that white resentment has always been driven by white anxiety. To be sure, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, heads of state wrote to President Johnson with concerns about backlash driven by the fear “that white people will be discriminated against” and that Black “law violators are not being apprehended and convicted while they continue to destroy life and property.” Compare this to the nearly three quarters of Trump supporters that believe discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against people of color. This reflects a zero sum game belief inherent in the ideology of white victimization — gains for Black folks or people of color equals losses for white folks.

The short of it is this: we’ve been here before. Both white resentment and Black rage has aways lied quietly just beneath the surface of American social and political relations. A range of factors are troubling the waters not the least of which is Trump’s demagoguery that, unlike his dog whistling GOP counterparts, resembles Barry Goldwater more than it does Nixon or Reagan. Instead of using the now sacrilege politically correct language of establishment politics, Trump is talking explicitly about a desire to return “to the old days,” when pesky protestors fighting for racial justice could be “punched in the face” and “carried out on stretchers”.

So how should we view this historical moment? These are the birth pangs of a new America being born— one in a long line of rebirths. What will she look like? Which decade or century will she resemble? America is at yet another crossroads in its’ short, complicated history. And as always, it will be the majority that decides the path the country will tread.